For the same price you have the Minisforum UM760 Slim which should be 100% compatible and provide VASTLY superior performances. Or you can check cheaper models that would have the same level of performance as the A5.
Geekom make nice products but they are usually both very expensive and very noisy compared to competitors. Their selling point is mainly their top-notch design, but I find these to be function-over-form most of the time.
Yeah, definitely boils down to how much of a factor the aesthetics of the 'tiny carts' is for you in the whole experience. I can imagine some creative modding that would make a collection of themed USBs just as appealing, if not more :)
The original paper abstract [1] cuts through a lot of the jargon on the website, but yeah it's just a research platform for capturing (and doing limited processing on) video and telemetry for the purposes of AR-focused ML research.
It's not a new headset or a protoype for one.
"Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data."
I think one insight (that's maybe not obvious enough on their landing page?) is that their product appears to be multiplayer out of the box (in the same sense that Figma is) which I think you'd agree is a pretty significant value add over your proposal of Unity + Meta simulator.
Yeah, to be fair to Boris ordinary.space looks like a much more appropriate tool for interaction design than Mattercraft, which looks much more like a drag-and-drop tool for building relatively static, single user 3D scenes. Mattercraft also looks to be pretty bloated with random content features (3D Text?) in comparison.
While Mattercraft has some drag and drop elements, it's predominantly a development environment for content, featuring TypeScript and NPM support. So it's a bit like a 'Unity for the web'. Many of the features (e.g. physics, particles) are provided as optional additional NPM modules. The 3D text support is included in the base 3D module because it only adds a few kb and Mattercraft's built-in bundler doesn't bundle it if your project doesn't use it. (My team and I run Mattercraft )
Thanks for the extra context. I haven't actually looked at what you at Zappar are doing for a while. Would you care to comment on what the key differences are between Zapworks Studio [1], Zapworks Designer [2] and Mattercraft [3]? Their elevator pitches on those pages feel like they have pretty complete overlap with each other tbh.
Zapworks Designer - it's our no-code tool focussing on AR+VR. It's targeted at folks without scripting experience and is very much 'drag and drop'. Our customers typically use this for bringing simpler interactive content to, e.g. menus, posters and also for Learning & Development.
Mattercraft - this is our complete 3D development environment for the web. We took everything we'd learned from Studio and built MC from the ground up embracing the web ecosystem. It has a fully featured animation system, scripting, built-in bundler, live preview, collaborative editing - the works :-) Our customers use this for building high end campaigns and content for consumers.
Zapworks Studio - this is our previous generation of creative tooling. It was originally built to target native platforms but we ported its runtime to the web. Mattercraft is the 'spiritual successor' to this tool.
Yes, our company [1] is profitable providing a B2B XR meeting platform used by various heavy industries for different internal and external use cases including product design, high-impact sales and training.
We're in Oil & Gas, Healthcare and Higher Ed amongst others and currently support Quest, HoloLens and Magic Leap.
We (and loads of competitors) are growing at a steady pace, the numbers probably wouldn't excite a VC associate, but there's more to life and business than that.
To be fair, neither of the two organisations responsible for Horizon over the period in question - Fujitsu Services, formerly ICL Pathway - in any way resemble your pastiche of "YC Offspring" startups.
Indeed, they were the exact opposite: huge multinationals with presumably gigantic legal, infosec and HR policy departments who could probably jump through the various compliance hurdles required by this procurement process in their sleep.
By comparison the startups you're complaining about usually take years to reach sufficient maturity to take part in large public sector procurement processes like this.
Clearly in this case maturity and scale were not a bulwark against incompetence, opacity and mendacity. Indeed the opposite - as I type this the Post Office's lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills are making mealy mouthed justifications for witholding reams of technical evidence from the public enquiry for months. It's disgusting, and as someone running a small business and endlessly having to justify our commitment to information security, data privacy and transparency I find the hypocrisy infuriating.
It's become very clear as the public enquiry has progressed [1] that Fujitsu were:
- aware of several bugs - including ones they'd fully understood the cause and mechanics of - that would induce double-counting of transactions
- aware that criminal prosecutions were underway against users of the system in which just such double-counted transactions would clearly have had a material impact on the case and the evidence aduced
- failed to raise the above in a timely manner, either to the Post Office who had directly requested audit logs, to external auditors, or to the justice system itself
Everything is not 2D. Most of the first-party apps they've showcased are, but both the launch event and subsequent videos + documentation have shown full 3D capabilities, both in VR and MR mode of operation for both first- and third-party apps (including full build support in the Unity engine, meaning a huge number of existing VR + MR apps will be deployable on to AVP relatively quickly if developers choose to invest in porting).
HoloLens was commercially released in 2016 and its successor, the HoloLens 2 in 2019, the latter of which is still available.
And the Google Glass (not 'glasses') would not have allowed 3D in any true sense as it lacked the capability to calculate the user's head pose in space, necessary for 3- or 6-DoF tracking. It was essentially a heads up display attached to your face.
As someone who came to computing through high level software and a little later than many (I wasn't dismantling appliances at age 5 like you hear in a lot of people's origin stories) this was a really empowering ground-up introduction to hardware architecture.
One of the few Coursera courses [1] I actually finished and found rewarding, challenging and fun throughout.
Those + some SD cards and a spare evening for setup makes this a really tempting £400 project.